Top 5 Tips for Using Instagram for your Business

On a daily basis, 75 million Instagram users sign into their personal accounts. On a monthly basis, over 500 million users search Instagram for appealing images. Instagram is becoming a necessary social media outlet for business owners, especially wedding photographers who can share beautiful images with potential clients.

In our Instagram for the Wedding Photographer Guide, we discuss simple strategies to help you develop and maintain a successful Instagram account. We also showcase a few Instagram pros who share their techniques to mastering Instagram. Here are 5 tips to help you properly use Instagram in for your wedding photography business.

1. Create Two Profiles

Consider creating two separate profiles – a wedding photography business profile and a personal profile. In your business profile, it is still important to share some personal photos, but you can use this to primarily showcase your wedding photos and gain followers who are potentially interested in booking you. If you started on Instagram with a personal profile, change that Instagram handle to your photography business name – this way, all of your followers will now be following your wedding photography business. Simply changing your handle allows you to keep the followers you gained and allows you to create a more business-centric page. From here, you can create a new personal Instagram account.

2. Maintain Consistency

Instagram offers you the opportunity to show off your brand, your creativity, and who you are as a photographer. Consistency is key to creating strong relationships with your followers and potential clients. Just like you may create a blogging schedule, create a schedule for posting on Instagram that works for you, and decide how many times per week you will post. Followers who know that you are consistent will await the images you post and will be more likely to share your page with their friends and family.

3. Use Hashtags Effectively

Hashtags are a great way to help you gain followers on Instagram. Use hashtags that focus on wedding photography and the locations that you shoot. For example, if a couple is looking to get married in Denver, they might search for the hashtag “#denverwedding” on Instagram. If you have tagged images with this, they have potential to see it. An easy way to decide what hashtags work is to search on Instagram for what hashtags are popular and get used. You can also experiment with hashtags to see what works and gets you more traction on your images.

“When I find fashion and lifestyle Instagram accounts I love, I follow them, and often take note of the hashtags they are using.” – Melissa Jill

4. Avoid Being Boring

Instagram is a resource for you to post your best images, whether those are from a wedding shoot or something you shot with your phone. Although you are an expert in wedding photography, try to avoid posting wedding images in every post. Keep your page fresh by mixing up the types of images you share with your followers. Remember that it is important to be relatable, so share some photos that will help followers relate to you on a personal level.

For example, if you love camping, post a few creative photos from your last trip. This will show that you do more than just shoot weddings, and you may gain followers that also share that interest. One of these followers may end up booking you because of your shared interest!

Also keep in mind that if you do not have an interesting photo to post, it is better to not post at all. Just like you are selective as to which images you post on your website, blog and photo gallery, be selective with the images you post on Instagram. Since this social platform is image based, people will judge you based on the images you post! Keep your images consistent and interesting in order to gain new followers and increase the number of likes you receive per image.

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5. Share Edited Images

When you share images on Instagram, you are showing potential clients what type of work you do as a wedding photographer. The best way to ensure that you are sharing your best images is to only publish professionally photographed, edited images. Further, you must ensure that your images have a consistent style across all that you share. ShootDotEdit can help you by taking the burdensome task of wedding photo editing off your plate, returning consistently edited images to you to post on Instagram. ShootDotEdit is as fast as 48 hours, so you can post your images quickly for your customers to see.

3 Comments

Good article, but I’d add the 6th point if you don’t mind. it’s concerning the usage of third-party applications (non of them violating Instagram regulations of course). In my opinion the growth of an account is too hard if you only use built-in means, since there’s no sound statistics, mass follow/unfollow options, possibility to schedule etc. As for me i use accordingly: statirg.am as the best for statistics, fast-unfollow.com as the fastest (5k per day) unfollowing tool and postso as the most affordable sheduling app. Btw thanks for suggesting Afterlight, i don’t even know how i could’ve missed it.

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ShootDotEdit is a professional photo editing service designed for wedding and portrait photographers. We design a personalized and stylized photographer's edit for every image and every job. We're best suited for the professional wedding photographer who is looking to grow their business through an outsource photo editing solution. Outsourcing image wedding processing allows a photographer to spend time on activities that have more meaning and value. We're here for you.